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ELLIE'S THIRD EYE [more info continued]

Cast
ELLIE - The Dreamer
ARI - The Insomniac
PROFESSOR ABBOTT - The Visionary
NIKO - Young Love

About The Play
My grandfather went off to work the late shift one night and when he returned in the morning, his wife had died of a blood clot in her sleep.  He spent the rest of his life writing haiku about this lost love and these haiku were my first introduction to love in the form of poetry.  Fast forward to the year of my engagement.  I had finally found my true love.  But I became so consumed with the fear of losing him to some gruesome sudden demise, I turned into an anxiety-ridden lunatic.  (I’m lucky the man still married me!)

This play ponders the intersection of love and fear. And what better place to do that than the fourth dimension. I was lucky enough to take a class entitled the Fourth Dimension with Professor Thomas Banchoff at Brown University. There was a whole lot of mathematics discussed that I didn’t understand.  But Professor Banchoff loved having students from different disciplines in the class as wel.l  I wrote a short story for my final.  And I heard that someone did a two dimensional dance.  What, then, as three-dimensional beings can we not see? The fourth dimension allows us to think about what we can and can’t see. And begs the question: does love exist if we can’t see it? 

 


ELLIE:  And that’s when I see the truck. 
An eighteen-wheeler. 
It’s on its side. 
Straddling the median. 
And there’s thick black smoke pouring out of it. 
And I think: this was the screaming dinosaur. 
Which is when my body floods with adrenaline. 
Some internal operator says: we’re in trouble here! 
And this magical liquid gushes into my veins. 
And my heart. 
And my brain. 
And it’s telling me we’re in danger. 
You’re in danger. 

Because that’s your car. 

It’s on the wrong side of the road.  It’s upside down.  And it looks like an aluminum can.  I mean, how can it look like that?  It’s a fucking Volvo!  The salesman said those are the safest cars on the road.  He said it’s got like fifteen freaking airbags, right? 
So you’re probably fine. 
All the safety things deployed and you were basically in a perfect protective bubble as the car was hurled into the air, over the median, and onto its back.  And um.

I can’t really remember much after that.